Warclouds in the Pacific

This is one of the series of shorts that Canada's National Film Board produced occasionally in the 1940s. In it, Lorne Greene - who, before he came down to Hollywood and starred in BONANZA, did a lot of narration for shorts like this - sounds mightily distraught as he tells us about the shipyards hard at work, and gives us warnings about Japanese war production, supervised by Nazis; 3000 Nazi agents showing movies to brainwash the Japanese leadership; and what looks to me like teenage girls doing synchronized swimming in schoolyards.

This movie was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary, but every studio in the US turned out a short that was nominated. Even Paul Terry's cartoon studio would pick up one, although that wouldn't occur until 1945.

There's discussion of the US Navy, which was expected eventually to be added to the might of the Royal Canadian Navy. There's lots of discussion of Pearl Harbor, which Greene calls "The Gibraltar of the Pacific." This movie came out about a week before the Japanese attacked it.

What's probably most noticeable about this otherwise fairly generic wartime documentary is that though it was commissioned by the Canadian Film Board, it doesn't really feature very much by way of Canadian military prowess. Indeed, aside from a very brief potted history of the industrialisation of Japan - built, it suggests, on Nazi inspiration and expertise - it focuses more on the US and UK operations in Asia before highlighting the US Navy's maritime equivalent of the Maginot line stretching south from the Aleutians. Lorne Green provides an enthusiastic and effusive commentary that is often just a little bit too over the top, and the plentiful stock footage helps to illustrate a message that is nowhere near as jingoistic as many other features made at the start of North America's preparations for war, but it is still just as propagandist - only from a more defensive perspective.